IMMIGRATION REFORM IS A VITAL COMPONENT OF CARE

EI than workers in goods-producing industries, like construction, where men are overrepresented, due to the EI program’s restrictive requirements. Workers who work part-time, which is more common for women, especially those with caregiving responsibilities, are less likely to meet the eligibility criteria for EI. The EI program must be reformed so that it values all types of work, including paid and unpaid care work, which is disproportionately performed by racialized and Indigenous women.

A survey of migrant care workers exposed the even more precarious employment conditions for migrant care workers who live in their employers’ homes. During the pandemic, live-in care workers who lost their employment also lost their homes, and those who remained employed reported an increase in working hours and unpaid wages and an intensification of employer control over their movements, among many other cases of abuse.

Currently, the Home Child Care Provider Pilot and Home Support Worker Pilot issue occupation-restricted work permits and pre-screen family members for permanent residency eligibility to attempt to minimize family separation and reduce worker abuse. Despite these policy changes, reports have shown that the complexity of the program and strict rules have made accessing permanent residency through these pilots even more difficult than in previous schemes.

The harmful impacts of Canada’s restrictive immigration laws have lasting consequences, and immigration reform must be combined with initiatives to remedy the harms that have been caused. 90% of workers admitted to

Canada’s policies to ensure equal rights and protections for migrant care workers score low. In Canada, there are 25,000 migrant care workers, many of whom are racialized women.67 As of 2019, 9.8% of all employees in private households were temporary foreign workers, despite only accounting for 2.9% of total employment.68 Many care workers can only access temporary work permits which provide few rights and protections and often do not offer accessible and timely pathways to permanent residency or citizenship.

One of the many ways Canadian immigration laws create precarity is by issuing employer-restricted work permits to migrant workers.69 For these workers, leaving an abusive employer means risking deportation and extending the timeframe before they can apply for permanent residency and family reunification. The threats of becoming undocumented or being deported add considerable stress to the lives of migrant care workers and violate their right to a safe work environment.

Canada through the Live-in Caregiver Program (housed within the Temporary Foreign Worker Program) which ran from 1992 to 2014 were from the Philippines. The temporary work permits did not allow care workers to migrate with their families, an example of the creation of global care chains. Today, data shows significant downward intergenerational social mobility for Filipino youth in Canada, and points to extended periods of familial separation under the Live-in Caregiver Program as one of the causes.

The devaluation of care work, which is typically viewed as women’s work, has led to a reliance on migrant workers in the care economy. This labour is both gendered and racialized, with immigrant women making up 31% of all nurse aides, orderlies and patient service associates in 2016, compared to only 13% of all workers. Twentysix percent of workers in those occupations were Black women, six times more than among all workers, and 25.6% were Filipino women, five times more than among all workers. Employers leverage the devaluation of care work to maintain low wages, limit employment security and avoid improving working conditions.

Migrant care workers also have difficulty accessing benefits, such as the Canada Child Benefit and EI. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a third of respondents surveyed for the Behind Closed Doors report on migrant care workers reported having difficulty accessing EI or the Canada Emergency Response Benefit. Not only migrant workers experience problems with EI; only 38% of unemployed people have access to EI.

Workers in health care and social assistance, where women are overrepresented, are less likely to access

In other policy areas that fall under provincial jurisdiction, the federal government can support paid care workers by tying transfer payments to adequate employment standards and by establishing best practices for labour rights for federally regulated workers. Canada is also in a position to ratify ILO Convention 189 on the rights of domestic workers, which in turn would result in the integration of laws to support and protect domestic work in provincial labour codes.